A Christmas Marvel

could have been free.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/100

You overpaid for your Shakespeare. I get my Kindle content from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) where everything is free.

The Kindle is a great device. Enjoy it!

You're welcome! :D

There are plenty of people and sites already for whom Amazon has morphed into one of the boogeymen of "international corporations" complete with scheming, cigar-smoking fatcats plotting and scheming against "the worker", "the common man", "mom and pop businesses", etc., but as someone who has and still works at Amazon - and on a site where the afore-mentioned boogeyman-creation is extremely unlikely to take place - I can tell you that those of us employed at Amazon work extremely hard to "delight the customer", and reading your glowing words really gets our rocks off.

I've worked a lot of places and many of them have marketers and PR people that work to present an image to the outside world that has nothing to do with what actually happens internally, but in Amazon's case, we really do start with "what would the customer want?" and work backwards. "How to make a profit" is a rare discussion, mainly because we know that our path to profit is a longterm one based on pleasing customers knowing that eventually that will turn into profit; I have never been involved in any discussion that included talk of "how can we squeeze more profit?" Likewise, I have never been in a discussion about "how can we trample our competitors?" Hell, we *support* our competitors, letting them sell their merchandise *on our site* at prices that *beat* ours.

For a libertarian, I couldn't have had a bigger jump in happiness than going from working for the federal government to working for Amazon. I used to dread going into work every day; now I can hardly tell the difference between weekends and workdays.

My mother bought me the Sony Reader (or whatever it is called.) I'm trading it in for a Kindle 2. Free wifi, a large library, and wikipedia? That's well worth the extra $60 -- plus the prices are way cheaper!

I actually owe the request to this blog. I'd never heard of Kindle had it not been for earlier praise here.

Politicians don't prance, they wheel and deal.

I have a kindle too.
You can get free stuff here (public domain): http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page (download the mobi versions of books). Has tens of thousands of books for free.
Also, you'll want to go to http://calibre-ebook.com/ which will help you manage the books; it will also scrape newspaper sites and RSS feeds and automatically put them onto your kindle.
mises.org has lots of economics texts and ebooks, including many of mises' and murry rothbards texts.

Did you expect the Government to do something for you, that you are now whining about?

I downloaded to my Kindle The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Democracy in America, and Tocqueville's lesser known and excellent Memoir on Pauperism, all for $0.99 each.

Not only has Amazon done more for me than any supercilious, patronizing, condescending, pompous and arrogant politician, so has the veterinarian who saved my cat's life the other day by giving him an enema and charging me only $27 for it. Fortunately for my cat his veterinarian won't be part of Obamacare.

And more than any politician ever will, most likely. I’m jealous.

how old fashion do i feel with my new paper back copy of "The Fatal Conceit"

I too received a Kindle -- I downloaded a book off this website ("Myth of Rational Voter") -- and the Bible!

Don Boudreaux wrote: "Amazon.com has done far more for me than any politician currently prancing around Capitol Hill or in the White House."

Clearly not true, since if Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet, Amazon wouldn't exist! :-)

On a more serious note, how do you know that?

"Amazon.com has done far more for me than any politician currently prancing around Capitol Hill or in the White House."

And therefore Amazon should begin to tax Don Boudreaux. (Oh...that wan't your point...? Merry XMas... :-> )

Congrats on the Kindle. I've had a Kindle 2 since February and love it. I even read Cafe Hayek on it.

Right now I'm reading Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice

My wife and I adore our Kindles. Unfortunately, as markets will, there's going to be a messy transition to e-reading. Amazon is in a format-war with Sony, and Apple's going to weigh in soon with their own device. Right now, public domain literature is safe, but if you buy newer works from Amazon, there's a possibility that they'll be stranded if Amazon loses the format war, which it may, as it has given the traditional publishing industry major heartburn over its insistence on $9.99 as the default price point for new releases (aka "hardcovers), and at that rate, they don't make a profit.

It's going to happen no matter what. Remember the BetaMax? ha ha
When I bought my PS3 I was confident Bluray would win that format war over HDDVD, mainly because of the PS3. Apple is comming in late but they have a huge market following so I'd put my money on that.

I like the Nook because of the Android op system and because it will read any pdf. So that's what I'm buying.

What a piece of work is a Nook!

Justin does prophesy the election lights on Nook; it has his dying voice.

I know of a secondhand store that has a XBox HD-DVD drive for sale. I'm sure they're kicking themselves over that one.